Sunday, March 06, 2016

I picked this soldering iron out of the ewaste recycling stream that students dump at the end of the year, figuring I could use another iron. I knew it ran hot. Yesterday I was attempting to create a data cable between a PC and a radio and was annoyed at how quickly oxidized the tip had gotten. After cleaning it and trying again (failing ultimately because the PS/2 keyboard connector happens to not use one of the pins) I noticed a subtle warm color to it--and thinking it was just the orange light pollution reflecting off of it, but then I put two and two together and realized it was black body radiation. And that means this soldering iron is really really bad.

The camera appears to have a fairly good IR block filter on it, so the colors match better to the eye's response. On a weaker camera I would expect a purple appearance to it as the blue Bayer filter will pass IR circa 900nm.